Develop Reference

Update PDF with acrobat form

We are using AcroForm to update the fillable PDF. We are facing issue when trying to fill a larger text/data in the available field, Data is getting hidden due to less space (form filed size).
I currently have a pre-made PDF, which I have gone and used Adobe Acrobat PRO to create some entry fields within the PDF.Once I have completed the entire form, I would like to use Java to run through the PDF fill in the form with the associated information from some data (JSON/database), and re-save the PDF.
We are using PDFbox to fill the data, but its not working as expected. Could you please suggest some better approach where I can use acroform to fill the data using java and rows can be shifted based on data available i.e. form field size can be adjusted automatically as per data size.
Please find attached image where we are filling data as "Arvind Kumar Mishra 1234567899999 xsd test" on of the acrobat form field but only "Arvind Kumar Mishra 1234567899999" is getting displayed. Remaining data " xsd test " is not visible.
Could you please help on same. If we can do the same with open source tool, it would be great, but any suggestion would appreciable.

How to add a row in a itext PdfPTable dynamically?

I have to create a pdf using itext which will contain a button, when clicked should add a row in an existing PdfPTable. I wrote some code to create a PushbuttonField. While trying to set action I can only find PdfAction.javaScript. I am not able to figure out how to add a row in a table. I tried searching online but all I could find is PdfAction.javaScript
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

When you create a PDF file, you draw text, lines and shapes to a canvas. That is also what happens when you add a PdfPTable to a Document. If you look at the syntax of the PDF page, you won't recognize a table. You'll find text (the content of the cells), lines (the borders), and shapes (the backgrounds), but you won't find a table. If the table is distributed over different pages, the "table" on one page won't know that it is related to the "table" on the other page.
Sure, you can add semantic structure to the document by introducing marked content, and by creating a structure tree, but that mechanism which we call Tagged PDF can't be used to make the PDF "editable" the same way a Word document is editable. Tagged PDF is (among others) used to allow assistive technology to present the content to the visually impaired (e.g. in the context of PDF/UA). The presence of structure doesn't change the fact that all text, all lines, and all shapes are added at absolute positions.
This is very different from HTML where the position on a page of a <table>, <tr>, <th>, or <td> is calculated at the moment the page is rendered. In HTML this position can even change when you resize the browser window.
There is no such thing in PDF (except if you use XFA (*), a technology that is deprecated since ISO 32000-2). All content on a page has a fixed position, hardcoded into the page's content stream. Changing the size of the PDF viewer window won't change anything to the position of the page content.
Because of all of this, your question is invalid. It is impossible to create a button in PDF that adds a row to a table, because:
In many cases there is no table: there is just a bunch of text, lines, and shapes at absolute positions,
Even if there is the notion of a table (using Tagged PDF): the visual represenation of that table is fixed at creation time, it can't be changed at consumption time.
You want to use an ordinary PDF viewer as if it were a PDF editor. That is impossible for all the reasons listed above.
(*) XFA was deprecated for different reasons. One of the most important reasons it is the lack of support for XFA. There aren't many viewers that support XFA. If you would post a follow-up question asking *"How can I create an XFA document?", the answer would be: "Don't do this!" Creating XFA is extremely complex, and once you've succeeded in creating an XFA form, you'll discover that many of your customers won't be able to consume the file because their viewer doesn't support the format.

How to add a non-printable image in xsl / apache-fop

I'm trying to generate an xsl to be printed in a pre-printed sheet which works fine.
Now i want to give the user a better previsualization (in the pdf screen version) adding a background image which emulates the "pre-printed" stuf on the sheet to give the user a "context" of what is he printing.
The question is: Is there any way I can set a background image in xsl (using apache fop) visible only in pdf but not in the printed version of it?
Thank you all for reading or givin any advice.

Although as the comments state, you can't have content in the PDF that does not come out in a physical printed copy, here is one possible work around for you. Depending on how your users are ultimately going to be using FOP for PDF rendering and how your a driving the work flow, it's possible to pass a parameter into an xslt file before the transofrmation phase is run, so potentially, you could do a dual rendering of the same PDF, one that is presented to the user where the background image is enabled, and one that gets printed, you could just set a variable similar to how they do in this Example, and call it something like $isPreview, and just use a simple if or choose statement to check for 'Y' or 'N'.
Since you are sending to a printer, you may even want to take advantage of FOP's ability to generate to Postscript rather than PDF, I've used this feature quite extensively for print documents using FOP while also producing a PDF copy for electronic delivery via email or hosted services, and I've yet to find any discrepancy between the PDF rendering and what is printed after sending a rendered postscript file, so it should work well for you as well.
As I said, this is not truly a solution to your problem as you've presented it, but as a work around, it could get you the desired results if your clever about how you implement it.

I don;t think the statement that it is not possible is true, I am just not sure how to create such a PDF with FOP. Certainly you can add an image field. One would use a button field and place the image in the button. Then you would set the properties of that button to not print (printable false).
PDF support images in fields: https://answers.acrobatusers.com/adding-image-field-form-q41825.aspx
RenderX supports PDF Form fields but I do not see where they support an image inside the button, only text: http://www.renderx.com/reference.html#PDF%20Forms. But they do support setting a field to "printable".

acroform field values is not working in icepdf

I am working on a project that should read a pdf file/form that contains value filled up by a Java code.
form.setField("permitnumber", p.getApplicationorno());
form.setField("amountpaid", p.getAmount_app());
form.setField("estimatedfeet", "56");
form.setField("receiptnumber", "123415");
form.setField("validity", "5");
Now my problem is, the values that were set on the fields of the pdf form worked perfectly on Adobe PDF Reader but not on the ICEPdf Viewer. What I am missing here? Why is it that the values from PDF form can't be displayed by ICEPdf?

While setting the field values using iText, If af is your AcroFields instance, try to do
af.setGenerateAppearances(true);
before setting values.
The PDF specification ISO 32000-1 defines a NeedAppearances flag, cf. Table 218 – Entries in the interactive form dictionary. If it is set to true, a PDF viewer knows that it has to create appearance streams for form fields.
iText interprets that flag and only creates appearance streams while filling in forms if the flag is not true (if true, the viewer is expected to re-create such appearances anyways).
Ooo at least used to create PDF forms with that flag set to true. Adobe Reader does respect the flag and creates appearances if true. Probably your PDF viewer does not respect the flag, probably it always expects appearances to already exist in documents.
Using setGenerateAppearances(true) you can enforce appearance stream generation. If the above assumption is correct, this should fix your problem.

Overlapping characters in text field iText PDF

I have PDF with text field which contains some characters. But the language specific characters are overlapping.
When it gains focus, text changes and displays correctly. When lost focus, displays incorrectly.
When text is edited displays also correctly.
File test_extended_filled.pdf see bellow
How I created PDF:
Created odg template in OpenOffice Draw 4.0.1 -> test.odg
Exported as PDF -> test.pdf
Edited test.pdf with Adobe Acrobat X Pro 10.0.0 and resaved with extended functions (needed to save on local PC) -> test_extended.pdf
Filled form by java (pdfstamper) -> test_extended_filled.pdf
Bonus: when i change font by pdfstamper in java it looks like changes are applied only on focused text too. -> test_extended_filled_font_size.pdf
Note: When I fill test.pdf from 2. it's displayed correctly -> text_filled.pdf
Attached files (go to download section):
https://rapidshare.com/share/ACC0D81E9235A6DA2CC2353BD21A4C37
After I added
stamper.getAcroFields().addSubstitutionFont
it's better, but some characters still overlap. -> test_extended_filled_font_size_with_substitution_font.pdf
http://rapidshare.com/share/0EE3238F37E9115C36A7A74706B09826
Any ideas?

Please take a look at the FillFormSpecialChars example and the resulting PDF.
Open Office doesn't really create nice forms. As mkl already indicates, the NeedAppearances flag can cause problems, the border of the fields is drawn onto the page content instead of being part of the widget annotation, etc...
In your case, you've defined a font that isn't optimal for special characters. Using a substitution font isn't ideal, because you can clearly see that drawing the glyphs isn't that much of a problem. The problem is that the metrics are all wrong. It's as if the special characters have an advance of 0 glyph units. In this case, you should change the font using the setFieldProperty() method.